CASS Presents: Olaf Breuning

30 March—4 November, 2018

Free with general entry

Cass Sculpture Foundation is delighted to present a major interior and exterior exhibition by leading Swiss artist, Olaf Breuning.

Grounds: Standing at over ten metres tall, Olaf Breuning’s Clouds compete with the towering treescape of Cass Sculpture Foundation. Held in place by rudimentary steel supports, the six cartoonish clouds are cut from polished aluminium and powder-coated in different hues of bright blue. Clouds is a permanent realisation of an earlier work in which Breuning used lifting cranes and boom lifts to elevate large blue cut-out drawings of clouds into the air for a momentary staged photograph. Their whimsical bulbous shapes and blue finishes are reminiscent of a child’s rendering of the sky or the set of a primary school play. Breuning’s Clouds harness this innocence to contrast with their surrounding environment. This naive depiction of the natural world provides a poignant counterpoint to the harsh realities of climate change created by human civilisation.

Main Gallery: Olaf Breuning turned the Main Gallery of Cass Sculpture Foundation into a temporary carpenter’s studio over the Easter weekend in 2018. Working with wooden doors, the artist created a series of large free-standing Scrap Faces specifically for CASS. With typical spontaneous rigour, Breuning encouraged surreal characters to appear in the makeshift wooden patchwork compositions.

Visitors gained a unique insight into the artist’s practice – observing how ideas are created, refined or abandoned in the pursuit of bringing physicality to otherwise intangible ideas. Traversing a fine line between absurdist humour and sincerity, Scrap Faces will be on view at CASS until 2nd September 2018. Visitors are invited to walk around the installation of towering faces which are at once ridiculous and primitively sublime.